On-line personalized radio service has demonstrated its appeal to music fans as evidenced by the continued growth of personalized radio service providers such as Pandora, LastFM and Slacker. These providers assemble personalized playlists for users by accessing a large music library where each song has a metadata field containing ratings on multiple stylistic parameters. A user inputs a preferred music style, and the provider's system extracts songs from the library for the playlist based on correlation to the song metadata field. Advantageously, users are provided with the capability to accelerate their discovery of new content which is largely aligned with their personal preferences, by skipping over content in the playlist which the user finds uninteresting.
A need exists for a personalized radio service using one or more broadcast services that provides personalized and updated content similar to conventional personalized radio services employing large music libraries, and that provides a spontaneous listening experience with greater opportunity for exposure to new music. A need exists for a live satellite radio offering with low cost hardware that does not require a large local song database to be built over time at a satellite receiver by recording content matches received over-the-air or via other broadcast method.
Conventional personalized radio services such as Pandora and Slacker enable users to set up different playlists for different genre preferences such as alternative, classical and comedy, but do not provide the capability to mix diverse personal content preferences into a single playlist. A need exists to expose users to diverse preferred content in a single continuous playlist without requiring manual interaction or forethought to change playlists or channels.
Satellite radio offers more than 100 channels of audio content. After initially exploring the content offering, subscribers typically narrow their listening choices to 10 or fewer favorite channels, which may be any combination of music and talk channels. For example, a subscriber may prefer listening to popular music and may preset 5 or 6 popular music channels on the radio, along with a comedy channel and news channel. With present radio receiver hardware, the subscriber is limited to listening to one channel at a time and therefore misses the opportunity to be exposed to content simultaneously broadcast on the other favorite channels. A need therefore exists for a satellite digital audio radio service (SDARS)-based personal radio service that provides the subscriber with an option to be exposed to content simultaneously broadcast on multiple channels selected for building a personalized radio channel playlist.
In addition, conventional personalized radio services do not carry news, live concerts or sports events which some users might like in a personalized radio channel playlist. A need therefore also exists for an SDARS-based personal radio service that allows the subscriber to select from among the diverse content channels simultaneously broadcast in an SDARS stream to build a personalized radio channel playlist from both music channels and talk channels (e.g., news, sports or comedy channels), the content of which is not typically provided in the on-line libraries of conventional personalized radio service providers.
Conventional personalized radio services are also disadvantageous in that user interaction with a computer is required to build the personalized playlist. A need exists for a personalized radio services that allows users who enjoy listening to music while driving to build a personalized radio channel playlist using a vehicle-installed radio receiver, thereby personalizing their received programming choices.